[Freegis-list] ESRI Geodatabase format

[Frank Warmerdam]

Dan McCoy wrote:

> Are there any free utilities for converting ESRI's geodatabase format 

> (.mdb) to other formats?  Even ESRI does not provide a way to convert an 

> annotaion feature class from a geodatabse to an annotation coverage.  I was 

> wondering if anyone was working on this.


Dan,

Based on a brief inspection it appears that the geodatabase is a standard
MS Access .mdb file with the geometry in a binary column in exactly the
same format shapes are held in a shapefile.  I had thought of trying to
build an ODBC based utility to translate this into a shapefile but there
hasn't really been much call for it.

Note that FME from Safe Software includes support for Geodatabase, but of
course that's not free.

There is apparently a project going on to implement at least read access
to .mdb files on Linux.  It might be interesting to build a more generic
translator using that instead of writing a translator that only works on
Windows because of the dependence on ODBC and Access ODBC drivers.

I would also be interested to hear if anyone is working on geodatabase
access.

Best regards,

-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent